caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

Happy Friday everyone. Welcome to Friday Night Photos your once a week escape from the day to day insanity of the world we live in. Post any photos, memes, music or whatever else you find of interest that helps tune out the madness.

This month the camera club went to the Palomar Observatory located atop Palomar Mountain (5470 ft. elev.) in San Diego's north county. It was a beautiful sunny day with temps in the upper 70s. Along with images of the observatory and telescope I've included images from around the grounds of the observatory.
A little history of the observatory.
https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/about/history.html

Giant Snow Cone - observatory dome

For the sake of brevity I'll condense the 1000 word screed I had in mind down to a few succinct thoughts.

• Has the federal government grown to be too powerful? In my humble opinion, the power out of Washington has become a leviathan that's out of control, both here at home and across the world. Would we be better off with decentralized governance, giving the power back to the states?
• Is the balance of power between the three branches of government out of whack? Forget the do-nothing houses of congress, they're worthless in my book. Has the prolific use of executive orders given the president too much power? If so, what about the judicial branch overturning just about everything the president proposes? The three branches were meant to be co-equal with separation of powers, were they not? Is this form of governance the new normal?
• Can you name a president that left the country in better shape than it was before he took office?

Bubble Pops Soon?

Matt Stoller recently put out an article about the AI bubble called 'What Would It Look Like If the AI Bubble Popped?'. He compares the possible popping of the AI bubble, and the consequent crash of the economy with a few other 'recent' bubbles, such as the 2008 financial crisis with its stupid bailouts of the big banks and not the little people (thanks Obama!) and the 2000-02 dot.com bubble bursting, which sent us into a recession.

Stoller notes:

'I think that an AI bubble popping could be worse than the dot com bubble, for a few reasons. The first is that we are a much more corrupt society, and so there will be less trust when a collapse happens and contagion is widespread. The second is the U.S. economy is less diversified today. We had a much stronger industrial base in 2000. Our financial markets are dependent on a few companies betting on AI data center spending. The counter-argument is that we are better at bailouts, so the Fed could stop contagion more easily. That’s possible too.

Not sure I agree with the counter-argument, because the bailouts aren't going to help the little people, are they?

If you can call a suburban street a gulch.